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Post PhreakNIC 2005 - We are drawing the maps for these territories
by Rattle at 10:52 pm EDT, Oct 26, 2005 |
Sorry it took me so long to post some commentary about PhreakNIC. After a convention, convergence, congress, or whatever term you wish to apply to a con, I feel its important to take some time to put the pieces together and reflect on what happened and what was learned before attempting to express any of it. The point of these things, in my minds eye, is to come together, engage in as much discourse as possible, and take away every bit each individual is capable of maintaining. The focus of my work surrounds building communities, enhancing media, and addressing security threats. It would be a great act of hypocrisy if I did not attempt to apply these crafts wherever possible. That means doing so, failing, and preparing to get it right the next time around. It also doesn't help that I had no shortage of work to get done in the past few days. I literarily have not had a chance to stop working on things since the weekend. This upcoming weekend, I'm looking forward to some rest.. Anyway, here is my PhreakNIC review. You are forewarned, this is going to be a long post. During the talks, I was attending to the speaker area on the 9th floor. This may have been the most rewarding place to be at the con. I was very surprised when I showed up to do my part of the AV to find that no one else was tasked with watching the room. It was a vacuum I was happy to fill. All the speakers were great about taking cues to finish up their talks, so the schedule went along as planned, mostly. I'd love to do it next year as well. Everything up there was going pretty smoothly, all things considered. All the talks were good. I was able to catch the bulk of them. There were a few I missed parts of, opting to monitor the situation from the back balcony, and only focus on the beginning, end, and helping with the switch over. I look forward to catching the video of what I missed. Being heavily addicted to smoking cigarettes, I needed some breaks for that. That back balcony made it very easy for me to do this. Not to mention, the view of the city from back there is excellent. Speaking of the video, Wilpig has already posted the talk video online on his website. Major props. This isn't the first year he has come through on this. I encourage others to mirror his site once all the video us up, and I'm sure several people will. Several people already have, although the only one I know at this time is MaxieZ's mirror. Some BitTorrent files for each of the talks would be a good idea too. I got up to the speaker area shortly after Dolemite's opening comments when Catonic's "Professional Wifi" talk was underway. This was Catonic's first time as a convention speaker, and he told me afterwards that he had been a little ... [ Read More (2.6k in body) ] |
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RE: Post PhreakNIC 2005 - We are drawing the maps for these territories
by Jason Scott at 4:32 am EDT, Oct 27, 2005 |
Speaking of documentaries, I was happy to finally have a chance to shoot the shit with Jason Scott....He is someone I support, even if we don't agree on everything. From what I gathered, we are coming at a number of issues from different angles. That's a good thing. I have a feeling we will be engaging in discussions. I hope he appears on this system. Buy his documentary.
Now, honestly, how could I not intend to get on here after talking with you. It'll take me a while, what with my other work, to really learn how all this works, but it's not the first time I've been pointed at or seen stuff on memestreams. Every time you and I were in the same general area, it ended in a great conversation. More of that! |
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RE: Post PhreakNIC 2005 - We are drawing the maps for these territories
by Rattle at 4:08 pm EDT, Oct 27, 2005 |
Now, honestly, how could I not intend to get on here after talking with you. It'll take me a while, what with my other work, to really learn how all this works, but it's not the first time I've been pointed at or seen stuff on memestreams.
The only thing that's really not the clearest about the posting end of the site is the bookmarklet. If you have that installed in your bookmark bar, its trivial easy to recommend articles. In fact, if you highlight text in the article when you select the bookmarklet, it appears blockquoted in the recommend window. In my opinion, the real killer application for it is news stories, which is what I really like to see massive discourse surrounding. The more informed we are, of both what's going on, and each other's opinions.. The more likely we are to be able to find solutions, establish political power, and actually exercise it. We are committed to creating a political neutral/agnostic platform. Both Tom and I have no intention of letting our various political viewpoints shape this system. I have no intention of trying to make a MoveOn. I'm more interested in creating a "common carrier" style environment. It's more challenging, and more rewarding. Every time you and I were in the same general area, it ended in a great conversation. More of that!
Hell yes. There were a number of good discussions coming in and out of phase at Phreaknic this year. In terms of convention size, I think Phreaknic hits a good head-count point. When you have between 300-600 people, it has a different feel and a much higher level of interaction between people than a convention like Defcon.. In the case when you have a very high number of people, it seems like most people stick with the folks they already know. In that situation, it's even a challenge just to see all the people you know. Let alone meet new people. At smaller conventions, it's easier to attempt to at least say "hi" to everyone, so people are more likely to do it. That's why we keep building these tools. I like to look at it like this.. When the consumer Internet hit the scene in the mid 90's, it pretty much destroyed the BBS scene. There was a good reason for it. The Internet is a much more powerful tool. Still, we were all very sad to see it go. Something was lost, but I don't think it was premaritally lost. It's taken some time for the real "replacement" to hit the scene. I think the approach we are taking here _is_ that replacement. At least for the message boards... The standard web BBS just doesn't do it for me. They do get a certain community feel to them, but there is still something missing that I can't every quite put my finger on. The filebase issue was taken care of about a dozen different ways first. The message system angle was more complex, and I'm sorry, usenet was not that replacement. It had all the problems FidoNet had, and way more. With an approach like we are taking, we will be able to get that community feel that any given BBS with activity had. Right now, this system feels like one group. When we do finally implement our public grouping architecture, I feel that will change radically, and very fast. Here is to the hope that we can start executing on this vision a hell of a lot faster than we have so far. I do get upset when I think that we have had our hands locked around this vision since 2001, yet have still not managed to truly bring it to fruition. We have created something cool, but its not even 30% of the way we wanted to have it by this point in time. |
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